System Toolkit: Switchblade

Helge’s Switchblade is a portable system troubleshooting toolkit made for helping power users, IT professionals, and system administrators to troubleshoot, maintain, and fix their computers. It’s basically an application launcher that contains numbers of portable applications that can be easily launched within the tool when needed. Because everything contained in this toolkit is portable you can save them all on your USB drive and carry it with you.

You can download it from its main website or directly from Sourceforge. It’s 46MB in a self-executable zipped file that can be easily extracted onto your external USB drive once it’s downloaded. Once extracted, you can launch it by firing up the HelgeSwitchblade.exe file.

The app launcher contains 4 tabs for different categories of tools, with each category containing a number of portable popular tools that have been proven useful. It also comes with a basic system information section that displays RAM, IP address, and computer name within the tool. Below that, it also embedded a live chat room that lets you communicate directly to the Technical Support Personnel, which sometime can be quite handy. The little chat room can also be popped out displayed as an individual chat client.

I also quite like the useful links and Log Grabber under Other tab, especially the latter that could be useful to extract the log files and save them to the USB drive under Log sub-directory.

Due to the license concern, the developer has removed a bunch of tools out of this toolkit. Though the concern is valid, I do wish it doesn’t discourage the developer from not actively maintaining this useful application. SwitchBlade is a great start for those who want to build up their own toolbox.